Chaos Rings wins the battle for Windows Phone 8 compatibility

We didn’t exactly get a new Xbox Windows Phone release this week, but Windows Phone 8 gamers DO get something new to play. Square Enix’s Chaos Rings, one of the highest profile games on the incompatibility list, is finally Windows Phone 8 compatible!

The game launched only for Windows Phone 7 back in March, hugely disappointing Windows Phone 8 RPG fans. Earlier this week it started showing up in the Store on Windows Phone 8 devices, but couldn’t actually be downloaded by most users. Just an hour or so ago, several of us managed to download it at last. The game's Store web page was down all week and just came back up as well. At last!

Four stories, one huge adventure

The story of Chaos Rings revolves around eight people who must participate in a mysterious tournament against their wills. The winners receive eternal life while the losers unfortunately stop living. Each of the four pairs has their own short playthrough (around six hours), and finishing everyone’s story opens up a conclusion to the entire tale. Plus some equipment earned from enemies carries over between those stories. On the whole it’s a clever way to make the game digestible for mobile audiences.

Graphically, Chaos Rings works much like Final Fantasy VII. In the overworld, backgrounds are pre-rendered and characters are 3D. During battles and cinemas, everything uses 3D graphics. The original game dates back a couple of years, but the character designs still impress. The Windows Phone version gets two black borders on the sides, as opposed to Final Fantasy's single larger border. Chaos Rings also has a fantastic soundtrack (only available on iTunes, argh) and Japanese voice acting (with English text, of course).

Achievement preview

Square Enix’s previous RPG Final Fantasy had nothing but secret Achievements, so nobody could tell what the Achievements actually were without consulting an outside source like our guide. Chaos Rings thankfully has just one secret Achievement and it’s for fighting a boss after completing everything in the game.

The rest of the Achievements come from completing each scenario and maxing a character, which I’m told is relatively painless if you know what to do. Just make sure NOT to go through the Original Door after completing a team’s scenario, as you’ll miss out on that scenario’s Achievement.

We’ll go into more detail in our full review, after I’ve had time to play through everything for myself.

Not for the faint of wallet

Chaos Rings’ new Windows Phone 8 compatibility is nothing but good news for RPG fans. But people who think everything should cost a dollar or less are in for some disappointment with this one, as it’s the single most expensive Xbox Windows Phone game to date. At $9.99 it actually costs a dollar more than the iOS version, which isn’t too uncommon but still worth noting.

Considering the iOS version launched at $12.99, it could have been worse. We are talking about a big budget RPG that offers more than 30 hours of gameplay and could easily sell for $30 as a 3DS or Vita retail title (but it IS downloadable on Vita). If this one sells well enough, maybe we'll get the prequel Chaos Rings Omega and Chaos Rings II as well. What do the RPG fans in the audience think?

Reader comments

Chaos Rings wins the battle for Windows Phone 8 compatibility

Blame, poor ram management. The main reason why Microsoft started to add 1Gb ram requirements for legacy Xbox live phone games is because there's a high chance of the game, locking up the phone.This makes to the phone reboot the os

So what the story on the save system in this game?
I would hope it's a save anywhere type of game since it's on a mobile device but I also purchased Spectral Souls where you need to have a 15-30 min chunk of play time and can't save mid battle.
Not having frequent check points or save area could be a deal breaker for me.

Well, I am not a casul, since I love Dark Souls, Quake 3, Touhou... But I don't have much money, and 10$ in my country is not so small amount of money. It's around two weeks of my pocket money :/
But yeah, if people saying that this is great game, I gonna buy it :)

Bought through side loading from web, but even so it fails to install with 1.78gb memory free. Bah, I need to complete Mass Effect first (bonus level needs some strategy). My next phone has got to have at very least 16gb.

What is interesting is that Microsoft ported The Harvest from WP7 to Windows 8/RT but not to WP8.

I wonder if the reason Chaos Rings launched first for WP7 is because it's from a Japanese developer, aimed at a Japanese audience, and WP8 has not yet been released in Japan (speaking of that, why the hell hasn't WP8 been released in Japan yet? I know that market is tough to get into because of the Japanese government's policies, but geez louise).

Chaos Rings would have launched on WP7 and WP8 at the same time but there was a compatibility issue. It took a while but they finally updated the game this week, fixing the issue. It's not a separate WP8 version. Agreed that The Harvest not coming to WP8 was odd.

Regardless of how good something looks upscaled, it's still only running upscaled at not at a native 1280 x 768 resolution. The higher WP8 screen resolution won't make extra detail come out that the game doesn't produce on its own.

Great news! I have been debating getting this, not from the cost, but from the fact that after trying the demo on my HTC Trophy, it runs a little slow. I am hoping that when I upgrade to WP8 in a few weeks, that it will run more smoothly with a newer phone with more RAM.

I appreciate quality apps and games. Even at its price, I'm going to purchase it. We need more apps/games such as this to help grow the WP Community. These sort of level of quality help entice new users, then more and more publishers/company/devs would develop for WP.

PayPal isn't available in Indonesia as well. We have Operator Billing from 3 major operator here in Indonesia. Why the need of credit card or PayPal again? Developers should be aware of this and publish to Indonesia.

"Hey we CAN BUY your apps using Operator Billing, so please publish it here!" :)